nature

The Wound is the latest collection from esteemed Australian poet John Kinsella, whose previous accolades include the Grace Leven Poetry Prize, the John Bray Award for Poetry, the Age Poetry Book of the Year Award, and three-times winner of the Western Australian Premier's Book Award for Poetry.

Jos Smith's debut collection is shaped by an intense sense of the interrelationship between the human and the natural, and has a strong and particular ecological ethic. It is complex without sacrificing fluency and lucidity: there's pleasure in the music of these poems and a sense of the body speaking them.

Nature and culture meet in poems looking at flowers cultivated and wild, trees in the garden and the rainforest, plants and creatures that live alongside them under the microscope of memory and imagination.

Self-Portrait with a Swarm of Bees, to be published in Arc's flagship translation series 'Visible Poets', combines the poet's unerring instinct for the surprising perspective on commonplace objects or events - plants, animals, landscapes - with a mischievous delight in the detail of the absurd, the precarious balance.

Surreal enough to be true, these poems waltz through encounters within families and without. The people depicted are in equal measure brutal and tender, in narratives that are strangely innocent, compelling and convincing.

Serbia's rich historical and religious history is evident in these poems and there is an untiring effort to reach beyond the sensations of the world around her towards mystical revelation, to communicate the incommunicable.